Research Guide to American Literature

essays such as “The Vietnam in Me” O’Brien describes himself as responding to
the draft notice with disbelief and disgust—he had participated in some antiwar
activities in college—and finally, with cowardice. Rather than standing up for what
he believed, he went to Vietnam and spent a year as a foot soldier in a war he
regarded as immoral. In “The Vietnam in Me” he says, “I have written some of this
before, but I must write it again. I was a coward. I went to Vietnam.” He served in
the Forty-sixth Infantry, A Company, Third Platoon, of the Twenty-third (“Ameri-
cal”) Division. Although O’Brien’s company did not know about the it until well
into their tour of duty, in March 1968 another unit of the Americal Division mas-
sacred between three hundred and five hundred Vietnamese civilians, most of them
women, children, and elderly people, in the village of My Lai.
O’Brien returned from Vietnam in 1970 and entered graduate school at
Harvard. Leaving his dissertation unfinished, he took a job with The Washington
Post as a national-affairs reporter, but stayed there only about a year. In 1973 he
collected some of his published and unpublished writings to create the memoir If
I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me up and Ship Me Home, which was well reviewed.
He followed it with the novel Northern Lights (1975), the story of two brothers
trapped in a snowstorm; one had fought in Vietnam, the other had stayed home.
His breakthrough was Going after Cacciato (1978), which won the National Book
Award. Now considered a classic of war fiction, Going after Cacciato is the story of
a soldier who decides to leave the Vietnam War and walk to Paris, of the men of
his platoon who follow him to bring him back, and of Paul Berlin, standing sentry
one night in Vietnam, whose fantasy about Cacciato and the platoon’s adventure
is intermingled with combat memories. Through these three intertwined strands
O’Brien suggests that war is ultimately absurd, while also incalculably boring and
peppered with moments of adrenaline and thrill. The novel Nuclear Age (1985)
followed Going after Cacciato.
In 1990 O’Brien published The Things They Carried, which won the Prix du
Meilleur Livre Étranger and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Critics Circle Award. It solidified his position as one of the major,
if not the most important, American literary voices to come out of the Vietnam
War experience. It has since become much beloved on college campuses. A genre-
blurring work, it is neither a collection of discrete short stories, nor is it a novel
with a continuous plot. It most closely fits the category of the short-story cycle
or composite novel. Many of the twenty-two named chapters can stand alone and
have frequently been anthologized, in particular the title story; “On the Rainy
River”; “How to Tell a True War Story”; “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”; and
“In the Field.” But many of the stories interrelate, doubling back to comment on
or even refute the action or assertions of earlier ones. For instance, “Notes,” which
follows “Speaking of Courage,” purports to tell which events in the latter were
true and which were not. Similarly, the experience of killing a Vietnamese soldier
related in “The Man I Killed” is contradicted, confirmed, and revised later in the
book. In a further move blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, the
narrator is named “Tim O’Brien.” These strategies have caused The Things They
Carried to be honored as much for its Postmodernist sensibility as for what it has
to say about the experience of a foot soldier in Vietnam.

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